Digital multimedia capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless communication devices, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, digital media players, and the like. Digital multimedia devices may implement video coding techniques, such as MPEG-2, ITU-H.263, MPEG-4, or ITU-H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), to transmit and receive or store and retrieve digital video data more efficiently. Video encoding techniques may perform video compression via spatial and temporal prediction to reduce or remove redundancy inherent in video sequences.
Most conventional video sequences are encoded and decoded in two-dimensional (2D) viewing format. However, three-dimensional (3D) sequences are also possible, in which case the video sequence has two or more views associated with each video frame. In this case, the two or more views may be combined on a 3D display to render 3D video.
In some cases, two or more views may be captured by different cameras, and encoded into a 3D sequence that includes the multiple views. Alternatively, one or more secondary views of a video frame may be synthesized based on an original 2D video frame. In order to facilitate 2D to 3D conversion, depth maps may be used to assign depth values to pixels of video frames. A depth map for a given video frame may be applied to that video frame in a view synthesis process in order to generate a secondary view or multiple additional views of the video frame.